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Web Hosting Data and Statistics

ICANN DATA AND REPORTS. ICANN publishes reports with various domain registry statistics on all the ICANN registrars. This seems like it should be a treasure trove of data. However, the main problem from the perspective of this study is the complex relationships between hosting companies. Many hosting companies are either subsidiaries of, or resellers for, other companies. The ICANN data shows data from the perspective of the parent company or the company behind the resellers. As as consequence, there is not data available for any of the “hosting companies” that you’d recognize, including Bluehost, Hostgator, SiteGround, iPage, FatCow, Dreamhost, etc. For the above reasons, we did not (could not) use ICANN data for our Best Web Hosting Rankings. Even so, we wanted to list it among the data sources and provide relevant links.

WEBHOSTING.INFO WEB HOSTING STATISTICS. This is one of the few sites that provides fairly comprehensive data on domain registrations by each hosting company. Unlike sources like ICANN (below), this site uses a methodology that allows them to show registrations by individual hosting companies, even if they are subsidiaries or resellers. There were still a few hosting companies missing from their data. I used this site to gather data on current # of domains registered by each hosting company, as well as the 1 month (actually 5 week) growth or decline in domains.

OPENSITEEXPLORER.ORG DATA. Many of the data sources I used are not “data sources on the hosting industry” per se, but provide publicly available data that might be used as proxies for non-available data. Opensiteexplorer.org, by SEOMoz, is one such source. I used this site to get data on SEOMoz Domain Authority, MozTrust, Total Linking Root Domains, and Total Linking CBlocks. The logic was that measures such as Total Linking Root Domains and CBlocks would provide good general indicators of popularity, partly because they reflect domains controlled and/or parked by the companies themselves (domain and customer volume), and partly because they reflect popularity in the sense of other sites linking back, which I assume to be roughly correlated with other measures of “popularity.”

ALEXA RANKINGS AND STATISTICS. Anyone who has been in the web space for any length of time knows Alexa traffic rankings are notoriously unreliable. I continue to have concerns about including this data. But ultimately, I made the judgement that the only reason not to include it is if you think it’s actually so misleading that it’s actually harmful. I don’t think it’s that bad, and I used it as just one point among many to indicate overall popularity level.

TWITTER PAGES. Not all hosting companies give the same priority to building the social media followings, and even in this era, it’s quite possible to build a successful business with major social media investments. Even so, because most do, and because social engagement is likely to be correlated with popularity more generally, we used Twitter followers as one of many indicators of popularity.

TWITTERCOUNTER STATISTICS. Just as Twitter followers can reasonably be used as a proxy for popularity, growth (or decline) in Twitter followers can be used as a proxy for rising (or declining) popularity. We used the 3-month change in Twitter followers from Twitter counter to represent this.

FACEBOOK PAGES. Just as with Twitter, the number of Facebook likes for each hosting company can act as a reasonable proxy for popularity. In fact, after Total Linking Root Domains, Facebook followers was one of the most highly correlated data series to Number of Registered Domains. Using both Facebook and Twitter also accounts for the fact that companies may prioritize one of these, but not both.

GOOGLE TRENDS DATA. It proved very difficult to find longitudinal data (data over extended time periods) for measures of popularity such as registered domains, linking domains or CBlocks, FB or Twitter followers. Yet seeing such trends is important. Despite the limitations and known issues with Google Trends data, we decided to use this as an indicator of changes in popularity over time. For each company, we just check the Google Trends data for brand searched like “bluehost,” “godaddy,” or “site5.” We limited the time frame to two years, October 2010-September 2012.

WEBHOSTINGGEEKS USER REVIEWS. WebHostingGeeks is one of the few sites that appears to have a large number of real user reviews. It’s still quite possible that many of the reviews on this site are fake, written by hosting companies about themselves (positive) or their competitors (negative). But if so, they’ve done a remarkable job making them sound realistic. More likely, some number are fake, but a large percentage are real, which makes this site one of the few sources of real user reviews.

BETTER BUSINESS BUREAU. This is a US-centric data set, but for companies that are included, the Better Business Bureau provides a solid and legitimate source of data about the customer experience with each hosting company. We used by BBB ratings and the Number of BBB Complaints Per 10,000 Users. The trouble with the BBB ratings along is that they are overly influenced by whether the company works directly with the BBB. For most users, this is less important.

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This site provides data-driven research and rankings for the major shared hosting companies. Rankings are based on 19 ranking factors, all pulled from publicly available data, that measure popularity, growth, quality, and overall consumer experience. Such aggregate data provides a useful alternative to reviews and recommendations based on personal opinion.